Seven Letters, Starts with L

The puzzle line at the Lakeshore Ledger rang at 7:02 on the Tuesday after Labor Day, as it did every morning a mistake had been printed, and Mara picked it up on the first ring, because there was only one person in Milwaukee who would be calling.

"Florence Wojcik," said the voice on the other end. "Layton Park. Ninety-one years old. You have an error."

"Good morning, Mrs. Wojcik."

"It's not your error, dear. I want to be clear about that. Yours are very rare, and when you make one it's an interesting one." There was a rustle of newsprint, the sound of a woman who had folded the Monday paper into quarters with a single crease, the way it was meant to be folded. "It's his. Monday. Twenty-six Down. Great Lake bordering Wisconsin, four letters. And the answer is ERIE."

Mara closed her green eyes and let the moment be perfect for exactly one second.

"Lake Erie," said Florence, "does not border Wisconsin. Lake Erie has never been anywhere near Wisconsin. Lake Erie is in Ohio, with the rest of Ohio. I looked at a map to be certain, and then I looked at a second map, because I didn't want to be unfair to the boy."

"That's very fair of you."

"I've been solving the Ledger since 1958 and phoning in errors since 1979," said Florence, "and that is error number two hundred and twelve. I keep a book. Please tell him." A pause. "Please tell him nicely. He has a lovely clue for OREO in the same grid. Twist ending? I laughed out loud. My cat left the room."

It was not quite eight, and the fourth-floor newsroom of the Ledger was mostly empty: a long room of old desks under buzzing lights, half of them bare since the last round of buyouts, the windows along the river side gray with early sun. The copy desk sat by those windows. On the pillar beside it hung a whiteboard, and across the top of the whiteboard, in Hector Salinas's square capitals, was written THE WAR.

Under it were two columns. One was headed MARCHETTI. The other was headed with Mara's name. Below each ran three years of hidden answers, the insults the two of them had tucked into each other's grids, all of them clued innocently enough to get past the desk. MUSTY, Like some Sunday fare, had started it. BLOWHARD had answered. Then SHOWOFF and PEDANT, GIMMICK and FUSSBUDGET, STUFFED SHIRT and one memorable Sunday in which the long theme entries, read down the diagonal, spelled NOT FUNNY.

Hector had already added a new line to Theo's column this morning, in green marker: PEDANT (again), Stickler, Mon. 17A.

Mara had never met Theo Marchetti. In three years, not once. He filed the weekday puzzles at two in the morning by email and never came in, and Mara filed the Sunday by email too, and came in only on Tuesdays, to proof with the desk. Somewhere out in the city was a man who thought Lake Erie bordered Wisconsin and had called Mara a pedant twice in print, and Mara did not even know what he looked like.

Mara knew a great deal more about someone she had never met at all. On a solvers' forum called the Blank Square, where people argued about crosswordese and posted times, Mara had been trading long private letters for two years with a stranger who called himself Downstroke. They had one rule, made in the first month: no names, no jobs, no newspapers. Inside that rule they had told each other nearly everything else. Last night's letter was still open on Mara's phone. Downstroke had written at two in the morning, as always, about his grandmother, who did the puzzle in pen and phoned him with her complaints, and who had told him on Sunday that his handwriting looked like a spider had died in ink. She's right, he had written. She's always right. It's exhausting. Tell me something true about your week.

Mara wrote it out on a proof slip, 26D ERIE: see map, and carried it across the empty newsroom with the ceremony it deserved.

Hector Salinas was already in, bald and neat in a gray cardigan, with his reading glasses on a cord and a mug that said PROOFREAD AND BE PROOFREADED. He read the slip and closed his eyes.

"I checked that clue," he said. "I checked it and I read it as Huron because I was thinking about lunch." He looked up at the whiteboard. "This doesn't go on the board. The board is for intentional. This is just sad."

"It's a little bit on the board."

"Correction runs tomorrow," said Hector, and went to his keyboard, and then, after a moment, came back to the whiteboard and wrote in the neutral column in black marker: ERIE (Mon.): Florence #212. "For history," he said.

Angie Moua, the youngest person on the desk by twenty years, rolled her chair over from the app terminal with her headphones around her neck. "Monday puzzle's up nine percent online," she said. "People love an error. They screenshot it." She looked at Mara. "No offense, but nobody screenshots yours. Yours are too correct."

"That's the job."

"I'm just saying," said Angie, "the numbers like a mess."

Stosh Nowicki, who had been on the copy desk for forty years and had a red pencil behind his ear that nobody had ever seen him sharpen, looked up from the obituaries. "He'll hide something about it in Thursday," said Stosh. "You watch. He always does when he's embarrassed."

At ten minutes past eight the elevator opened and Irene Kowalski came out of it at speed, with three phones, a garment bag, a roll of antacids and a face like a weather front. She had been the sports editor for twenty years before she was managing editor, and she still walked through the newsroom as if something important were about to be fumbled.

She stopped at the whiteboard, read it, and did not smile, which was unusual. Irene liked THE WAR. She had told Hector once that it was the only thing in the building that got letters. Real letters, on paper, with stamps, from people who had opinions about whether FUSSBUDGET was a fair answer on a Wednesday. The sports section had not gotten a letter on paper since 2011. The editorial page got emails in capital letters. THE WAR got stationery.

"Did you see the email?" she said to Mara.

"What email?"

"The one I haven't sent yet." She dropped the garment bag on an empty desk. "The paper was sold on Friday. You know that. Everyone knows that. Aldridge Media Partners, out of Charlotte, nine papers and counting. The new owner is in town. His name is Preston. He wears a fleece vest indoors." She unwrapped an antacid and looked at it without eating it. "He has a list of things he'd like to cut. He's very nice about it. The puzzle page is on the list."

Mara felt the floor tilt, very slightly, the way it did when a theme didn't fit.

"They want to license a syndicate," said Irene. "Puzzlewire. National. Cheap. Same puzzle in two hundred papers, nobody local, no errors, no Florence." She put the antacid back in its roll. "I said no. I said a lot of things. I said them loudly. And I have a plan, which you are going to hate."

"How much am I going to hate it?"

"My office. Ten o'clock." Irene picked up the garment bag and her three phones and started toward the glass office at the end of the room, and then turned back. "Marchetti's coming in. In person. I called him at five this morning and he said a word I won't repeat, and then he said yes." She looked at Mara over the top of the phones. "Comb your auburn hair. Be nice. I mean it."

The door of the glass office shut behind her.

Mara stood beside the whiteboard in the empty newsroom, under three years of insults in two colors of marker, and realized she had just under two hours to decide what Theo Marchetti was going to look like, and that Mara had, without knowing it, been deciding for three years.